Solomon Hykes is pretty sure you only know two things about Docker: First, it uses Linux containers, and second, the Internet won't shut up about it. In the video below, Hykes gives a talk at LinuxCon to explain exactly what Docker is and the philosophy behind it.

As Hykes points out, users nowadays expect apps to behave like the Internet: unattached to a machine, readily available, working the same no matter how you interface with them. This means software needs to be decoupled from the underlying machine -- "the app needs to be everywhere and nowhere," in Hykes' words.

This is where Docker comes in. It provides the tools to build distributed applications in a standardized way that can be packaged up and moved to all sorts of different systems. Thankfully, when it comes to the technical talk of how Docker accomplishes all of this, Hykes not only does a good job of explaining in plain language, he has all sorts of cartoon animals to illustrate the concepts.